Sean Hannity Is An Existential Threat To American Democracy. Here’s The Proof

There’s a definitive, must-read study on Sean Hannity’s dangerous mission to destroy our democracy by bolstering, goosing and emboldening Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. That is not an exaggeration.

Today, Media Matters' Matt Gertz published the study I've been waiting for. Gertz reviewed "all 487 of Sean Hannity’s segments about the first year of Robert Mueller's investigation" and explained, with great specificity, just how Hannity spins a web of deceit designed to sabotage the investigation, any findings of Trump wrongdoing and our independent system of justice.

Hannity’s perniciousness is complicated and extensive. But his tactics are not. Hannity's basic conspiracy-theory attack claims that Trump is the victim of a “soft coup” carried out by a hostile “deep state” out to get him via the Russia investigation, with the cooperation of the media. Meanwhile the real criminal according to Hannity’s propaganda, Hillary Clinton, goes free. Media Matters broke the strategy down into four components:

Delegitimizing the press: “The media has been corrupt and lying to you, the America people.”

The counter-attack: Trump as victim of “the biggest abuse of power corruption case in American history."

The authoritarian endgame: “Mueller’s probe is tainted. Hillary is a criminal.”

As Media Matters notes, Hannity’s theory has no legitimacy and doesn’t even make sense:

“This narrative bears little relationship to reality: In the months leading up to the election, the FBI kept its investigation into whether the Trump campaign collaborated with the Kremlin’s effort to support his candidacy a secret while repeatedly calling attention to the Clinton probe, likely costing the Democrat the presidency.”

But while Hannity’s claims should have been laughed right off the air, they have gained traction and mushroomed:

“Hannity’s success has spawned a legion of right-wing imitators who use similarly dire language to hype the menace they say Mueller poses and to prime their audience to support the frightening actions they are encouraging Trump to take in response. Some, like Fox hosts Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro, have also developed personal relationships with the president, advising him both privately and through their programs.”

Media Matters provides numerous examples of the distortions, deceptions and misinformation that Hannity has spent the past year promoting in service of his destructive mission. And while some of Fox’s most respected talentcringes, Fox management either looks the other way or, perhaps, overtly encourages him.

Promoting a false narrative in service to politics is bad enough, though we have become used to it with Hannity. With similar enthusiasm, Hannity promoted Trump’s bogus birtherism in 2011. His encouragement of Cliven Bundy’s armed insurrection against the federal government was a precursor to Hannity’s latest effort to undermine the rule of law.

Hannity’s story is in step with the president’s own crude preferences and biases. Trump prefers an authoritarian model for law enforcement, in which the job of the Justice Department is to protect him and punish his enemies. Hannity’s show is providing Trump with both constant encouragement to act on those impulses, and is a powerful propaganda tool urging his base to support him if he does. Hannity benefits in turn from his private access to the president and Trump’s public displays of support for his program.

This joint strategy is working. Hannity’s ratings have never been higher. And while polls show broad support for Mueller’s probe, among Fox viewers and Republican voters, the Fox host and his colleagues, in collaboration with the president, have successfully poisoned the well.

The result is a very dangerous moment, in which the president could act on Hannity’s entreaties for authoritarian action—and escape unscathed thanks to the supine congressional Republicans and the unyielding support the host and his allies have inculcated for the last year in Fox’s legions of viewers.

[...]

Because the president has been the target of crimes that were “worse than Watergate, on a million levels here,” Hannity argues, many of the people involved in the Russia investigation will need to go to jail. Hannity and his guests have accused senior Justice Department or FBI officials involved with the investigation of crimes in 186 segments, 38 percent of the total. In 28 segments, they accuse Mueller himself.

[...]

If Trump ever takes such dire steps as firing Mueller and Rosenstein—or forcing investigations of his enemies—he has every reason to believe that Hannity’s propaganda effort will keep the Republican base on his side, forestalling any real accountability.

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Sadly, it’s increasingly likely that Hannity and the Pence White House will get away with this gambit. And this approach, as noted is nothing new to Hannity or to Fox News.

From the beginning, Fox News has been intended as a safe space for angry conservatives to hear what they want, and to poison real discussions about news with Right Wing talking points. So during the second Bill Clinton term, the approach was to play the Clinton White House as corrupt and beleaguered, to set up the narrative of the criminality of the Clintons and hopefully form the basis for a Right Wing version of their history playing them as crooks. (This was of course a response to the attention given to the real criminality of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses – the Right Wing hoped to throw the same mud onto the Clintons and thus tar everyone, which would also feed a basic narrative of “the government is totally corrupt.”)

The second that George W. Bush squeaked into office in the disputed 2000 Election (where the eventual recount showed that he actually lost the state of Florida by a tiny number of votes), Fox News changed its tune to uber-patriotism. Suddenly, the Right Wing was all about everyone standing with the President and any questioning or debating was to be seen as treasonous. When the Right Wing moves toward deregulation completely tanked the US economy and when the W White House was shown to be a hotbed of criminality, not a word was to be spoken about it on Fox News, other than to blame anything they could on the Democratic Party. Even as the real numbers for George W. Bush hit incredible lows near the end of his presidency, Fox News and Hannity celebrated him, acting as though they were in a bubble from reality.

The second that President Obama was elected, Fox News swung the pendulum hard in the opposite direction again. It was now absolutely necessary and patriotic to challenge this unworthy man at every opportunity, and to obstruct every single thing they could. Ridiculous conspiracy theories about his birth certificate were amplified, as were desperate hunts for any potential scandal or criminality. The scenario was actually even more hostile than during President Clinton’s terms, where the Right Wing had occasionally found a way to vote with everyone else to get things done as needed. With President Obama, there was to be no compromise at all – Republicans made it a point of pride to vote against everything, and to refuse to participate. The Fox News approach was to defend the Republicans as patriotic Americans and to portray President Obama as weak, inept, suspect and secretly corrupt. The result was a situation where the Right Wing grew even more distanced from reality, and even less able to hold a civil discussion with anyone outside their own circle.

With the campaign of Donald Trump and the rise of the Pence White House, Fox News found itself in a position where not only could they indulge their audience’s hatred of Democrats and non-whites, but where their propaganda would actually be used by the new Tweeter in Chief as the basis for Pence’s actions in the government. We are now in a situation where the vicious musings of Fox News hosts are being put into action by the Pence White House on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Never before in our history have we had synergy of this kind, and never before have we seen so many disastrous actions taken by the Right Wing. But they feel emboldened now, so they’re going for everything they can while they have their majorities.

From the beginning of the Mueller investigation, Fox News has worked overtime to discredit it, led by Hannity’s usually unhinged rants every weeknight. (This is in comparison to the endless investigations of President Obama’s White House, where each time we were told by a breathless Hannity that Joe Sestak, or Fast & Furious, or Lois Lerner or Benghazi was the thing that was going to lead to criminal prosecutions of everyone the Right Wing hated.) Hannity’s approach here was an amplification of the spin from Rush Limbaugh (who Hannity copies whenever he can) – to dismiss the investigation as bogus, to ridicule the facts, and to throw mud at everyone on the other side. This strategy had already worked to discourage millions of Americans from voting in 2016 (the “midterm” strategy of lowering turnout, which worked on gullible Democrats, who soured on the negative campaign and stayed home, just as the Right Wing hoped they would).

For the Mueller investigation, it’s clear that Limbaugh and therefore Hannity were concerned that the situation could result in another Watergate or Iran/Contra, where people could be forced out of office and/or prosecuted. The Right Wing response has been to circle the wagons and use the “midterm” strategy to confuse as many people as possible. The actual narrative of this matter isn’t complicated – we know that attempts were made to poison the well during the 2016 campaign, and the evidence makes clear that the Trump Campaign was happy to have this assistance and apparently participated when they could. The criminality here isn’t whether the election was actually impacted – it’s the fact that the Trump Campaign was participating in the effort. Knowing this, the Right Wing has responded with a blanket denial that the Republicans could have done anything wrong and a further spin of “I know you are, but what am I?”, which is probably fitting given the extreme childishness of the Pence White House. In addition to asserting that the Pence White House did nothing wrong and that there’s some massive conspiracy to attack poor Donald Trump, there’s the added fun of trying to blame the whole thing on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Fox News pundits have even taken the step of accusing the Democrats of being the ones to throw mud to obscure the facts, a neat reversal of reality.

The ultimate intention of Limbaugh, Hannity and Fox News is twofold. First, they want to prevent another Watergate-style collapse of a White House. As Geraldo Rivera has admitted, the idea is that if Hannity and Fox News were pulling these shenanigans in the early 70s, Nixon would never have been forced to resign. So their hope is to throw so much mud that the audience finally just tunes the whole thing out and there is no groundswell of public outrage at the criminality of the Pence White House. The second intention is a cruder one – revenge against the Democrats and particularly Hillary Clinton, for having had the temerity to run in 2016. The constant drumbeat of demands for investigations and prosecutions of the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Campaign is not just for show. Fox News is advocating for the perp walk we’ve been expecting Pence to initiate on the Clintons. I’m frankly surprised we haven’t seen it happen yet. After Mueller indicts Kushner and Don Jr, I believe it will be a short period of time before Trump does exactly what Fox News and Hannity have been priming him and us for: pardons of the Trump Campaign people before they can say anything, and arrests of the Clintons, regardless of whether any charges have any basis in reality. Given the inability of the Right Wing to recognize much of reality these days, I would not be surprised to see Limbaugh and Hannity’s fans happily gloating when these things happen.

Given the likelihood of the Republicans keeping the Congress this fall, the Pence White House will almost certainly be able to survive the Mueller investigation without any casualties other than people like Flynn, who will be pardoned at some point in the process. I also expect Trump to pardon himself before leaving office, to make sure that no indictment can ever be raised in the future.

The only way to address all of this is for the Democratic voters to actually show up this November, as well as in 2018. Had they done so in 2016, we would not now be in this situation.

No amount of money or intensity of belief in a cause could lead a man (or woman) to ignore such a mountain of evidence and so publicly push a tissue of lies. His career is over when the truth about Trump and all his treasonous minions is proved beyond doubt.

The only potential motive for Hannity’s behaviour is pure self-preservation. Dobbs and Pirro COULD conceivably be acting on their desperate (and rather pathetic) need to remain in the spotlight and in a job.

Sean Hannity is a liar
Sean Hannity is a fraud
Sean Hannity is a coward
Sean Hannity is a traitor

Repeat – again and again. It cannot be stressed enough. I’ve said for years that this pig is an existential threat to the security of the USA. He has proven himself to be a treasonous little shit who needs to be dumped upon, and in a BIG legal way. I hope he ends up in prison along with his paramour, Chump.